Michael Horn, president and chief executive of Volkswagen Group of America, told a U.S. Congress panel that he had nothing to do with the device and was unaware until early September that for years the cars had software that tricked regulators into believing they were compliant with USA emissions rules.
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“There might be a slight impact on performance”, Horn said to a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “To my understanding, this was not a corporate decision”.
Volkswagen has suspended four workers and said a recall of cars with the suspect software could start in Germany in January.
“We have broken the trust of our customers, dealerships, employees as well as the public and the regulators”.
Despite being sure that the defeat devices were the work of a close-knit cabal with no communication to management, Horn said VW has not yet determined who those couple of engineers were and the investigation remains ongoing.
“I agree, it’s very hard to believe”, Horn said. I think it will be part of the discussion. Out of this, 20 percent is TDI, which is 0.05 [percent] and we can multiply this.
The statement comes after the company finally revealed two days ago how many cars are caught up in the global scandal that affects 11 million cars globally.
The executive denied having any prior knowledge of the software, which detected when emissions testing was taking place and turned on emissions controls only when the vehicles were being operated in a test laboratory.
Volkswagen has come under fire from consumers and regulators since the company acknowledged the use of a “defeat device” to pass emissions tests.
John German, a senior fellow specialising in emissions and efficiency technology at the worldwide Council on Clean Transportation, the non-profit group that first noticed the real emissions from VW’s diesel vehicles were far above regulatory limits said: “What we don’t know yet is if the 2016 AECD is also a defeat device, or is a device that meets the guidance previously given by the EPA”. “This was a couple of software engineers who put this in for whatever reason”, he said. He said that the recent events “do not reflect the company that I know and to which I have dedicated 25 years of my life”. The company is evaluating different solutions as a fix, with a few cars requiring only a simple software update and others needing the installation of new hardware.
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He said in an interview published Wednesday by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the development of an engine is “a complex process” and that these were tasks in which “a director is not directly involved”.
